


All of Life

by StellarRequiem



Series: Retcon of the Sith [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: AU (sort of) in which Anakin's characterization actually aligns with Vader's, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate title: George Lucas totally could have had his cake and eaten it too, Everything is the fault of Sidious' evil and Anakin's ambition, Gen, Obi-wan and Anakin bromance dynamic, Padmé is not a wet rag damnit, Padmé/Anakin is of course present but is not the central narrative, WITHOUT subtracting 90 percent of the characterization we expected to see in Anakin based on Vader, and here's the proof, and kept with the plot he wanted for the prequels, if Anakin were older and more self assured AU, movie novelization-inspired, original Vader backstory, prequel fix-it, script-inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 00:18:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5606425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The meteoric rise of Anakin Skywalker in a universe redesigned around his original backstory and characterization, as laid out in the novelization (and script) of Return of the Jedi.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>___</p>
</div>Obi-wan meets Anakin amidst the events of Episode I, but he's a little older, a lot livelier, considerably more calculating, and more viciously ambitious than the Anakin we know from the movies. While certain pivotal events from both Episode I and II remain the same, the rest of the narrative shifts, reflecting a re-imagining of Anakin whose actions and motivations actually demonstrate the kind of thinking that made Darth Vader so formidable.
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [homesickblues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/gifts), [Debesmanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Debesmanna/gifts), [Enabler#3YouKnowWhoYouAre](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Enabler%233YouKnowWhoYouAre).



* * *

 

". . . Then this brought him to mind of the way he used to look— striking, and grand, with a wry tilt to his brow that hinted of invincibility and took in all of life with a wink. Yes, that was how he’d looked once."

\-- James Kahn, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

pg. 174

* * *

 

Obi-Wan’s first impressions of Anakin Skywalker are as follows:

He is brash, he is young (no more than 16 or 17, to Obi-Wan’s 20) and he is impulsive.

Both the first and third of these observations are evident in his treatment of the queen’s handmaiden, an equally bold—but gentle-hearted—girl by the name of Padmé, who answers the boy’s inflated posture and quick tongue with a moment of aghast and a sharp rebuttal that only serves as fuel for the fire of Skywalker’s smile. He asks her if she’s an angel.

“I am not,” she tells him, “and I’m unlikely to be a paying customer, either, if you keep following me around the lot like that.”

Skywalker laughs, but he does add several feet of space between them, biding his time until she picks up some inscrutable piece of scrap metal to inspect before he speaks again. It’s evident, when he does, that he knows what he’s talking about. That much is a relief, given the absurdity of their current situation, which involves—among larger conflicts—what sounds distinctly like an attempt by Master Qui-gon to _gamble_ for necessary parts and services; placing bets against a slave-holding local merchant to whom Skywalker himself is beholden. What precisely the deal is, Obi-Wan doesn’t immediately approach his master to ask, though it apparently involves some madness with a podrace that brings Skywalker to Obi-wan’s side, speaking in low tones.

“You’re entering the race,” he says. It’s a statement rather than a question, and he watches more than listens for Obi-Wan’s reaction with eyes that are staggeringly bright against the sun-tanned-and-freckled flesh that surrounds them. And it’s not just his eyes: the boy has a _presence_ to him that’s disconcerting, too lively for the monotony of his surroundings. This space-port is busy, crowded, but old and tired and set in its ways and its misery. The planet of Tatooine on the whole is much the same way. Skywalker wears that tired, roughened, sand-hewn way of life in his movements, in the fading purple circle under his right eye, in the scars and scabs and calluses on his hands, and his threadbare clothes, but he speaks—and stares—with the same unforgiving intensity of Tatooine’s twin suns. It’s strangely appealing.

“So it would appear,” Obi-Wan answers him after a moment of eyeing Master Qui-Gon’s back, and his ongoing negotiations.

“Good luck,” Skywalker scoffs. “You’ll need it . . . that, or a damn good pilot.”

“Did you have someone in mind?”

“That depends,” he replies, with a cockeyed grin like a wink to the world—and teeth-gritting defiance. Nail-digging desperation. His easy nature turns sweltering in Obi-Wan’s mind’s eye, a wave of feelings he wasn’t trying to read bombarding him without invitation, which Master Qui-Gon turns around to inspect for himself.

Arms crossed across his chest, Skywalker leans against a work bench with a casualness that belays the intensity beneath the surface. He smiles with the destructive and creative promise of a supernova, a plot in his mind that Obi-Wan can _feel_ forming, hyperfocused on a single concept: a way out.

When Master Qui-Gon acquiesces to negotiating the boy’s freedom along with his services as a mechanic, in exchange for his willingness to fly, Skywalker’s promise to win this podrace escapade with his hands behind his back, for all its levity, carries a weight that could shift balance of the Force itself.

>><< 

Her name is Padmé.

She has a secret, he can tell. The Jedi are immune to it, but _he_ knows. What it is he doesn't care, but he can feel its presence. Whatever it is, it carries with it authority and sophistication and the reek of the disallowed; things _he_ can't touch or keep. Not some slave boy mechanic from Tatooine. Or anyone from this lonesome desert rock, for that matter. A Hutt, maybe, could buy her favor, or her queen’s, though a Hutt is a Hutt and she, he is certain, is far too good for that.

He’s grateful for the way she’d talked to him despite her fancy bearing, though, as if she weren’t any better than him, except in her bemusing, biting-but-respectful manners. She looks to his memory like sharp edges wrapped in something soft, and as he stares up at the ceiling—his eyes roaming over the darkened surface of it until they reach the open sky through the looming doorway above and behind his cot—Anakin acknowledges before the stars that it’s a _something_ he’s aching to touch. The urge to _have_ her is needy and churning, branded into the back of his mind, the burn still blistering even now.

Anakin sighs into the night, and his mother stirs sleepily beside him. This thinking will undo him, if he isn’t careful. The race is tomorrow. The rest of his life, his chance at a life, is tomorrow, but he’s going to end up a smoking fireball in the sand, wrapped in superheated metal, reduced to the remnants of a collision before a cheering crowd, if he doesn’t get some _sleep_. Which he can’t. She’s burning in his head, a taunt, a dream, and he can’t rest like this. All he can do is think.

 

>< 

 

Next he sees Padmé, she’s standing at the sidelines with the Jedi. _Jedi._ She smiles at him, once, as he climbs behind the controls, curling a hand around the throttle.

“See you at the finish line,” he calls out to them, to her. The older of the two Jedi nods a reply, wishes him the guidance of the Force. Padmé wishes him luck.

But he’s never needed luck—nor has he ever possessed any. All he _needs_ is incentive.

A picture forms in a flash in his mind: her standing at the finish line alongside the promise of freedom, right there on the horizon for the taking. And he _will_ take it. That knowing settles in him with a furious certainty. He is going to win this. He is going to win it all.

 


	2. Chapter 2

That no one had previously discovered Anakin and spirited him away to the Jedi temple in a frantic rush to train him is baffling to Obi-Wan. That power such as his could have been so long sequestered, hidden away from the galaxy, speaks—at least in his mind—to an astounding blindness on the part of the council. He tells Master Qui-Gon as much when they arrive on Coruscant. Qui-Gon’s reply is cautious and inscrutable.

“I’m not wholly convinced that they are unaware of him,” he says, though he isn’t  forthcoming about what rationale could possibly underlie dismissing someone with whom the Force is so unrelentingly strong, and he’s even less receptive of Obi-Wan’s suggestion that they bring Anakin in person before the council. He doesn’t say _no_ , precisely, but he does warn Obi-Wan in no uncertain terms that he should not, under any circumstances, suggest such an idea to Anakin himself; at least until he’s had a chance to discuss it with the council. Which is an order Obi-Wan follows to the letter . . .  until Anakin corners him to ask directly (on Padmé’s behalf, of course) where Master Qui-Gon has disappeared to. Bright eyed and intrigued, honed in on Obi-Wan’s calm dismissal, he ekes out an explanation through choice questions and irresistible levity.

He seems stunned by the answer he receives.

“A Jedi? _Me?_ ” he sounds as though he might laugh, although there is a feral wariness in his bright eyes that he masks with words too biting in their content for their casual delivery. “Aren’t I a little old to be one of their child soldiers?”

“Younglings are just learners,” Obi-Wan corrects, after only a momentary stutter. “They don’t see combat. As for your age . . . it _would_ be unusual, but . . .”

“Wait.”

Obi-Wan pauses. Anakin’s eyes narrow, focusing their twin-sun intensity squarely on Obi-Wan’s forehead, as if he could read the answer to what he’s about to ask before he says it.

“When was he going to ask me whether or not I want to?”

Obi-Wan can’t immediately answer, and Anakin looks at him in a way that steals the words off the end of his tongue anyway. For a moment he seems too quiescent to be Anakin at all—the roguish young man Obi-Wan has slowly been getting to know vanishing before his eyes into someone so . . . _young_. Yet, potent. Like a loaded blaster.

“I’m done letting other people make decisions for me,” Anakin warns, voice a little darker, if not entirely dangerous. “I’m not a tool for someone else to use.”

He says it so emphatically that, when Naboo later goes to war with _Queen_ Padmé Amidala’s blessing (a revelation that surprised only Obi-Wan, his instincts bested by those of both his master and his smirking new acquaintance) he’s genuinely surprised by what a good _soldier_ Anakin turns out to be.

He proved intense and fearless, a leader in his own right— a dearth of tactical experience notwithstanding—with a reckless insistence on doing everything himself that others are happy to simply follow. But he _does_ take orders. He takes them _well_ , with exacting discipline, and, having consented to fighting for Naboo—and for Padmé—in the first place, he takes _almost_ all of them without question. And those he does question, he still executes . . . albeit with his own sometimes-broad interpretation of _how._ Contrary to Obi-Wan’s expectations, his fiery nature responds well to the structure of command in general; the non-disruptive and natural chaos that he carries with him, a sense he gives off not unlike the constant, steady churning of the sea, quiets within the confines of clear and reasonable orders.

And what’s more, if he’s at all frightened, he faces down that fear with a raw determination that’s contagious, even among Force-weak fellow soldiers, falling back on the consistency of orders, and the satisfaction of seeing results. _Those_ he feeds on, ravenously. He _thrills_ with accomplishment. At being good at what he does.

And he’s good at a little of everything. It’s uncanny, really, how quickly he acclimates to each new situation, each new weapon.

And he flies as if the vehicles were a part of him, just another limb, as if he could feel the air—or vacuum of space, depending—outside the cockpit and respond to it directly. He flies as fast as he fights hard, lustful and inspired, clawing after victory and then some.

If he does train as a Jedi, Obi-Wan is certain, that lust will be the hardest tendency for him to break.

 

>< 

 

Lust, in the end, is actually what keeps Anakin away, though he admits as much only when pressed.

He approaches where Obi-Wan sits in the aftermath of battle, grief stricken with his master’s lightsaber clenched in his shaking, pale hands, and sits down beside him in uncertain, tired silence. It’s Obi-Wan who presses _him_.

“Will you come back with me?” He asks him. Anakin shakes his head.

“I can think of more reasons why I’d want to stay here—” he begins, then pauses, redirecting himself. “I’m sorry.”

“ _I’m sorry,”_ is also what Padmé says, from atop her recovered throne as Obi-Wan takes his leave.

Later, Master Yoda will instruct him to reconcile his loss, to let go of his grief, and move on. He does so in the most literal sense: roaming far away from Naboo. He doesn’t see it again for a long, long time.

 

>< 

 

When Obi-Wan does reunite with Anakin, the boy from Tatooine isn’t a boy at all. He’s grown up and cleaned up, and looks sharp and fully prepared to climb the ranks of whatever intricacy of Naboo law enforcement—something to do with the Queen-turned-Senator’s personal security—that he’s entrenched himself in. In his new position, he’s surprisingly strict, and hard, and almost Jedi-perceptive. He has a cold edge to him now that demands respect, and it mixes strangely, though ultimately well, with his usual nonchalance.

He’s changed in other ways, as well. There are no bruises on him now, though there is a blaster at his belt, and the marks of the harsh climate of Tatooine have faded slightly from his skin and greatly from his hair, which looks darker without the constant bleaching of binary suns. Indeed, Anakin on the whole is darker in ways that go far beyond his complexion. He’s hurting.

“My friend—,” Obi-Wan’s greeting begins pleasantly, and devolves immediately, the arms he’d outstretched falling back to his sides as he’s overwhelmed by the intensity of what he’s sensing. “. . . What’s happened?”

Being around Anakin is as much a barrage of feeling as it ever was, raw and unrelenting, so it’s disconcerting when the onslaught suddenly stops. Anakin glances at Obi-Wan, a wary, aching flashing in his eyes, and chokes his emotions back, pressing Obi-Wan out, before he answers. It’s not a gesture of _control_ so much as restraint, which is not entirely the same thing—although Anakin’s feigned calm suggests that he, at least, may believe that it is—but it serves well enough to leave Obi-Wan bewildered, unable to predict exactly what sort of poor tidings to expect. There is a moment of quiet.

“My mother,” Anakin finally answers, flatly, with a hard set to his jaw. “She died.”

For an instant his feelings boil over despite himself. Much of what Obi-Wan can sense in him is bitter, and very much like rage.

“Anakin, I’m so sorry. May I ask—”

“Sand people. She was abducted.”

“Anakin—”

“I’d prefer not to talk about it,” he snaps, clearing his throat and collecting himself before adding, “Come on, Pad—the _senator’s_ office is this way, and she’s looking forward to seeing you again.”

He manages to add a smile as he speaks of her, a toothless grin that cuts a deep gash in the hot swell of his radiating grief and . . . and _something else_ he buries. It, too, feels almost like rage. Rage that could have been unsettling if not for the fact that it feels directed, not outward, but toward Anakin himself.


	3. Chapter 3

Obi-Wan _knows._ That much is obvious. He greets Padmé and then looks at Anakin with a tiny little quirk in his brow, impressed. And surprised. Perhaps he should be, given that Anakin is, too. He shouldn’t be: he’d told himself that he’d have her, so it follows that he does. But the way she looks in the early morning—when her hair is freely curling around her like a halo, sticking to her cheek, when the skin of her back is soft and hot against his chest, softer and warmer by far than her indulgent, over-priced sheets—sometimes makes him wonder. Self-assuredness be damned, the strange reality that something as exquisitely beautiful and brilliant as Padmé could belong to _him_ so often feels like a miracle that he has to remind himself that he earned her: That he fought for her. That he entertains her. That he is indispensable to her in more ways than one.

. . . That it is very possible that he loves her; a feeling he has yet to express to anyone.

In that respect, Obi-Wan’s effortless assessment of the tension between them comes almost as a relief. It’s nice to have someone _know_. Especially someone like Obi-Wan; wise without having forgotten what fun is, and without having traded curiosity for common sense the way many of the twenty-somethings Anakin’s detachment seem to have done. They don’t understand the difference between inertness and biding one’s time, which Obi-Wan does. _Definitely_ does. However laughable his infinite (and forced) patience seems, it’s something he is grateful for.

Obi-Wan manages to wait not only until they’ reach the hanger Anakin has been charged with inspecting, but _inside_ of the ship they and Padmé will be taking to Coruscant, before surrendering to his curiosity.

“You and Padmé have grown close,” he remarks. Anakin grins.

“You could say that.”

“Oh, very coy. I’m just being polite, you know. Neither of you are particularly subtle.”

Anakin drops the scanner he’s been sweeping across the ship’s controls to his side, and pivots to face the man beside him. Obi-Wan stands with waiting, even judgmental posture with his arms crossed over his chest, a brow lifted toward a hairline that has much improved in styling since last Anakin saw him.

“What can I say? She adores me.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Obi-Wan retorts, and Anakin laughs, long enough and loudly enough that Obi-Wan cracks a smile.

“I’m happy for you both,” he adds.

It’s easier than it should be to tell Obi-Wan everything after that. It comes out a little at a time, then all at once, pouring out of his mouth in a torrent of words about how he can’t believe he has her, and how he hadn’t known if was possible to love someone who isn’t one’s own flesh and blood so _much_. How incredible she is, sharp-soft and undaunted. How conflicted _he_ is, knowing that the one thing he’s realized he might want as much as her is also the one thing that would disallow his ever touching her again.

Anakin could almost laugh at Obi-Wan’s startled response to that, wry though it would be: however formidable Obi-Wan’s Jedi perceptiveness has grown, he still looks taken aback.

“You told me once,” Anakin ventures, watching Obi-Wan’s eyes for something, anything that will tell him if what he’d decided to take for himself next is still within reach, “that there could be exceptions for older learners, under the right circumstances. I wanted to know if that’s still the case.”

Obi-Wan is slow to answer, calculating. Too slow. It’s frustrating.

“Just tell me,” Anakin urges, a little snappish. “You don’t need to put it to me gently.”

Gentleness has never had much space in his life. No point in starting now.

“It would be a hard sell,” Obi-Wan concedes. “The council would need to see that you are exceptionally strong with the Force—which you are— _and also_ willing to learn. I can tell you right now, Anakin, they won’t take kindly to your habit of doing everything your own way.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Indeed. I think it’s also unlikely that they’ll overlook your unfamiliarity with the Jedi tradition so late in life. To be a Jedi is a lifestyle, and a calling, not a rank or a position. I’ll admit that there are elements of the Code which may be somewhat outmoded, but it _is_ what we live by, there is a reason we teach such young learners—it’s a lifetime pursuit.”

“I know,” Anakin insists. The words come out sharp.

He speaks too soon, before Obi-Wan has even closed his mouth. He tries to patch together his hurried response, but how best to express the depth of feeling behind his adamancy, though, evades him. He doesn’t know how to put it into words—the _calling._ The itch that’s been scraping apart the back of his mind, like a voice he can’t quite make out, close and yet distant, nudging him towards forgotten corners of the royal archives,  that makes the strange practice of meditation, and control so contrary to his impassioned soul, seem almost. In the right doses. And he doesn’t know how much he should admit to, whether his hesitant steps down the paths he’s seen outlined in books are a sacrilege in and of themselves. So he settles with expressing the rawest, most ambiguous element of this feeling that he can, knowing it to be pure, if irrational:

He tries to tell Obi-Wan about the Force.

The way it’s changed him since he came to understand—since his first encounter with the Jedi—that _it_ was what he’d been feeling all his life in the form of background noise and little glimpses of something sometimes brilliant, sometime crackling, sometimes calm. In his mind it’s a breathing, infinite thing that swells when he does, echoing his anger, his love, his vigor for living. It coils in the trigger of his blaster. It rests between him and Padmé in the dark, singing a wordless song of potentiality he doesn’t understand but which makes her mouth taste all the sweeter. And, when he flies, he imagines he can feel the whole, vast expanse of the galaxy as if it were coiled just outside the cockpit, and the more he focuses on it, the more infatuated with the feeling he becomes. The stronger that feeling like the universe is _his_ becomes _._ Or, at least, the feeling that it could be.

Obi-Wan listens to him speak in silent, rapt, parted-lip but wordless fascination, and shakes his head.

“If the Council denies your request, that’s the end of it,” he warns, glancing away.

“Then tell me how to keep them from denying it.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes flash. He purses his lips.

“Depending on exactly how . . . dedicated to _tradition_ you’ve gotten in this soul searching of yours,” he says carefully, word by word, testing Anakin’s response, his feelings, while his own are wary but  also so _excited_ that Anakin is certain he can sense them, “I don’t know if you’ll approve.”

Anakin snorts. And smiles again, finding that the gesture has to be forced into existence, but remains on its own accord.

“Try me.”

>< 

 

They meet in the dead of night, every night, far from prying eyes. It’s nearly dawn, a month later, the first time Obi-Wan hands him a lightsaber to train with.

It feels _right_ in his hands. And so, so powerful.  He could do anything with this.

Do anything, for anyone. For himself, for Padmé. He could _take_ anything. Could _deserve_ anything. Deserve a title: A _Jedi_ could be more than his history, his background . . .  A Jedi could _deserve_ _her_. For a lifetime. For forever.

A Jedi wouldn’t still look at her sometimes and feel a bolt of guilt so powerful it split him open, because she doesn’t know what he’s capable of.

But all that means, he tells himself, is that he should have done this sooner. He should have taken the opportunity the first time, because a _Jedi_ wouldn’t have so much blood on his hands. A Jedi could have saved his mother; without a massacre.

But he did wait too long, and he isn’t a Jedi. Not yet. Though he will be: that’s so clear now, with the weapon’s hilt warming in his hands. And he vows to himself—staring into the bright beam, listening to it hum—that he will not waste this second chance, nor its promise of what he could become.

* * *

 

End of Act I

 

* * *

 


End file.
